Dog Blood

Something on the far side of the square has caught my eye. Covering virtually the full width of two adjacent buildings from ground level to a height of about six feet are what looks like hundreds of posters. As I get closer, I see that it’s a huge collage of photographs of people that have been pi

I stop and stare at a random face, one of hundreds, no more or less remarkable than any of those above, below, or around it. It’s a man in his late forties with a mop of curly dark hair, a short beard, and dark, angular-framed glasses. There’s writing in the space below his face. It says, “James Jenkins. Killed his wife Louise and daughter Claire.” There’s a similar scrawled message on the next picture: “Marie Yates. Murdered everyone that mattered to me.” These aren’t the faces of victims, I realize, these are their killers. Christ, is my face up here somewhere? I panic and start quickly sca

It won’t make any difference.

I force myself to move on, knowing that I can’t afford to waste time. Somewhere in this stinking, unhygienic, overcrowded wreck of a city, the woman I used to share my life with might still be hiding. And if I can track her down, she’ll be able to tell me what happened to my daughter.

29

I MUST BE GETTING close now. I thought I knew the address Sahota gave me, but around here it looks so very different from how I remember. I’m back out on the farthest edge of the refugee camp, heading for the border with the exclusion zone. The number of Unchanged around me has quickly diminished as I’ve moved out from the center of the city again. It’s a relief not to be surrounded by them and not to have to constantly struggle to keep myself under control. The buildings here are more empty than occupied. There are one or two Unchanged almost always in sight, but they make every effort to ignore me and slide back into the shadows when I approach.

I stop outside a fortified house, metal grilles and bars covering its windows and doors. The houses on either side have been destroyed, but this one looks like it’s managed to escape much of the fighting undamaged. Curious, I walk down a dark, narrow passageway between the house and the rubble of its nearest neighbor. The badly decomposed body of an Unchanged man lies facedown in the middle of an overgrown lawn, military fatigues flapping in the wind around his skeletal limbs. He’s been dead for several weeks at least. Was he the owner of this place? The back door’s been pried off its hinges, and I go inside. Most of the furniture has been used to blockade each room, leaving just a chair, a small table, and a bed in an upstairs bedroom. The remains of boxes and boxes of supplies cover the floors, and the walls have been daubed with pointless, empty slogans. death to the haters is one, kill them before they kill you another. There’s nothing of value left here. I leave the house, shaking my head and laughing to myself at the pathetic Unchanged who clearly spent so long trying to defend and protect what was his. Total waste of effort. He’d have been better off taking his chances in the center of town with the rest of them.

The wreck of a truck blocks the road ahead. It’s over on its side like a beached whale, the contents of the overturned Dumpster it was carrying now scattered across the entire width of the road. I clamber through the clutter and continue down a sloping ramp toward what was once a busy local shopping area. My footsteps echo around the small, drab, square plaza. Half of the open space is submerged under a shallow pool of black, germ-filled water. At its deepest point a dead soldier’s booted foot sticks up above the rippling surface like a shark’s fin.

Around me are a succession of abandoned and looted stores-a bookmaker’s with signs in the window advertising odds on an international soccer match that never took place, a fish-and-chip shop, a takeout pizza joint, a hairdresser’s, a general store… I don’t waste time looking in any of them. If there was ever anything useful in there, it would have been taken or destroyed by now.

I cross the plaza diagonally, feeling increasingly uncomfortable and exposed as I walk around the edge of the lapping lake of dirty rainwater, a Hater deep in Unchanged territory. Are they watching me? Eager to get under cover, I quicken my pace and head out between another two deserted buildings. Then I finally see the place Sahota sent me to find. The Risemore Conservative Members Club is as ugly as everything else around here, a squat, square, redbrick social club that looks like it might actually have benefited from having a bomb dropped on it. I used to do all I could to avoid places like this in the days before the war. When I was little, before he walked out on us, my dad used to drag me out to his drinking club some weekends. I’d sit there with him, bored out of my mind, having to make one can of Coke last for hours while he got drunk, smoked, read the paper, argued with his equally drunk cronies or sat and watched piss-poor comics, singers, and variety acts that, by rights should have been ba

I can’t get in through the front entrance; an impassable mound of fallen masonry blocks the door. I go around to the back to look for another way in, cursing my naïveté. I was never supposed to get in through the front. You don’t want just anyone to be able to stroll up and knock on your front door if you’re trying to coordinate a terrorist cell, do you? Is that what I am now, a terrorist? A suicide bomber without the bomb? Or am I the bomb?

A narrow, brick-walled passageway runs from the front of the building straight through to the back, opening out into an enclosed but largely empty parking lot. Can’t see anyone around here, or even any evidence that anyone’s been here for a while. There’s a fire exit, a strong, metal-clad doorway. I hammer on it with my fist and wait for an answer, starting to doubt whether I’m at the right place. A mangy tabby cat darts out from under a hedge behind me, racing across the parking lot and scurrying for cover under an overflowing Dumpster. Instinctively I whistle for him. I used to like cats.

The fire door opens, catching me off guard. I spin around and find myself face-to-face with a tall, powerful, nasty-looking bastard covered in tattoos. Thank God we’re on the same side.

“I’m looking for Chapman,” I tell him, remembering the name Sahota told me to ask for.

“Who is?”

“I am,” I answer without thinking.

“And who are you, you fucking idiot?” he sighs, taking a step forward and forcing me away from the building, into the middle of the parking lot. He rests his hand on the hilt of a monstrous knife with a vicious serrated blade.